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Black Urbanisms: a new podcast series from UCL Urban Laboratory

30 September 2021

This four-part podcast series from UCL Urban Laboratory explores what the term ‘Black Urbanisms’ can offer us as we think about cities and urban experience.

Black Urbanisms podcast series graphic

The Bartlett is excited to announce the launch of Black Urbanisms, a new four-part podcast series from UCL Urban Laboratory to mark Black History Month. 

Using the influential work of sociologist Prof AbdouMaliq Simone on Blackness and the Urban as a starting point, this new podcast series sources different perspectives on the utility of the term ‘Black Urbanisms’ and what it can offer us as we think about cities and urban experience.

Hosted by Dr Alana Osbourne (Université Libre de Bruxelles), Black Urbanisms emerges from two Urban Lab sessions curated by Prof Jennifer Robinson in 2019 as part of an international conference on emerging themes and critical methodologies at the frontiers of urban theory and practice and features contributions from Dr Lioba Hirsch, Prof Ola Uduku, Dr Hélène Neveu-Kringelbach, Victoria Okoye, Dr Evance Mwathunga, and Prof Wilbard Kombé. 

In the first episode, host Dr Alana Osbourne revisits excerpts of Prof AbdouMaliq Simone’s 2019 talk from the conference that considered the multiplicities of Black Urbanisms as a series of refrains, calls and responses, parallel but complicit investigations and makings. The aim here is to interpret some of his insights and transpose them to urban research in various cities.

Other episodes, which will be released every Friday throughout October, consider Blackness as a form of unsettling in the racialised city, Prof Simone’s notion of the “hallucination of Whiteness”, and theorising from Africa.

Find out more